"Bad Blood", "The Upstarts"

[fiefoe]

John Carreyrou detailed a couple of picture-perfect evil bosses in Elizabeth and Sunny. The $400,000 legal fee one whistleblower racked up to fend off Theranos's lawyers is jaw-dropping, but Theranos and the Fuisz's legal feud proved to be the impetus of their downfall too, so there's karma there. And who'd think federal regulators are the avenging angels in this story?

Some early notes:
__ A former Oracle guy being the CFO in the prologue (Henry Mosley?)
__ Stanford's Chinese program
__ yet another dig at Larry Ellison: early buggy Oracle software vs. medical device...
__ Who the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.

• While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.
• In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self help books to her, 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you.
• One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual.
• After some discussion, the four men {the board] reached a consensus: they would remove Elizabeth as CEO. She had proven herself too young and inexperienced for the job. Tom Brodeen would step in to lead the company for a temporary period until a more permanent replacement could be found. They called in Elizabeth to confront her with what they had learned and inform her of their decision.
  But then something extraordinary happened.
  Over the course of the next two hours, Elizabeth convinced them to change their minds.
• Midway through that day’s meeting, Elizabeth made a big show of giving Miquelon an American flag that she said had been flown over a battlefield in Afghanistan. She’d written a dedication to Walgreens on it.
• the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered. Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said. Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.
• A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.
• Walgreens’s rivalry with CVS, which was based in Rhode Island and one-third bigger in terms of revenues, colored virtually everything the drugstore chain did. It was a myopic view of the world that was hard to understand for an outsider like Hunter who wasn’t a Walgreens company man. Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a result, Walgreens suffered from a severe case of FoMO—the fear of missing out.
• The odds that Holmes could pull off this latest Houdini act while under criminal investigation were very long, but watching her confidently walk the audience through her sleek slide show helped crystallize for me how she’d gotten this far: she was an amazing saleswoman. She never once stumbled or lost her train of thought. She wielded both engineering and laboratory lingo effortlessly and she showed seemingly heartfelt emotion when she spoke of sparing babies in the NICU from blood transfusions. Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.
• Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate.
• Aside from its cartridge, pipette, and temperature issues, many of the other technical snafus that plagued the miniLab could be chalked up to the fact that it remained at a very early prototype stage. Less than three years was not a lot of time to design and perfect a complex medical device. These problems ranged from the robots’ arms landing in the wrong places, causing pipettes to break, to the spectrophotometers being badly misaligned. At one point, the blood-spinning centrifuge in one of the miniLabs blew up. These were all things that could be fixed, but it would take time.
• He explained that la mattanza was an ancient Sicilian ritual in which fishermen waded into the Mediterranean Sea up to their waist with clubs and spears and then stood still for hours on end until the fish no longer noticed their presence. Eventually, when enough fish had gathered around them, someone gave an imperceptible signal and in a split second the scene went from preternatural quiet to gory bloodbath as the fishermen struck viciously at their unsuspecting quarry. What we were doing was the journalistic version of la mattanza, Mike said.
• After the elder Mr. Shultz and Mr. Brille conferred in another room, the lawyer agreed to the grandson’s condition, the younger Mr. Shultz says. By then, though, he had second thoughts and said he wanted his own lawyer. His grandmother fished out a phone number for the elder Mr. Shultz’s longtime lawyer and gave it to her grandson. That afternoon, Tyler Shultz met with his grandfather’s lawyer and a partner at the same law firm and decided not to sign anything.
• After Jobs died in 2011, Holmes even seemed to begin borrowing management styles from Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of the former Apple CEO. Carreyrou writes that Theranos employees “were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’ career she was impersonating.”

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I was expecting a more colorful story than what Brad Stone delivered.

1. One of Airbnb's founders who got his start in spam, scraped Craiglist for listings and promoted 'cross listing'.
2. Lyft and Sidecar are the original 'rideshare' companies, Uber started out focusing on turning black taxis legit.
3. I basically look at enterpreneurship as risk arbitrage. (Kavnick from Uber, who started in 'file sharing')